Spitballing IoT Security

Thu Oct 27 19:06:13 UTC 2016

Perhaps something which is needed is analogous to Maritime Law's "Law
of Salvage".

If a manufacturer abandons all support of a technical product then
they lose various intellectual property rights which might prevent a
third-party from providing support.

Including reasonable assistance such as providing source code needed
to support that product which could be provided to the third-party
under NDA. But it can't just be refused.

Perhaps this can be triggered by the sort of security concerns
expressed here.

This could be interesting since at least the US govt generally writes
minimal terms of support into purchase contracts such as soonest end
of life from time of purchase, soonest end of support thereafter,
often several years. How that works beyond a vendor's bankruptcy is
beyond the scope of this discussion but suffice it to say it's been
considered.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage

On October 26, 2016 at 18:01 rfg at tristatelogic.com (Ronald F. Guilmette) wrote:
 > 
 > In message <58111BD4.80403 at vaxination.ca>, 
 > Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca> wrote:
 > 
 > >My smart TV not only hasn't gotten updates in years, but Sharp has
 > >stopped selling TVs in Canada. (not sure if they still sell TVs elsewhere).
 > 
 > A little more than 2 years ago, I bought a last-of-its-kind demo
 > model of a 50 inch Panasonic Plasma TV which was on sale (due to
 > having been discontinued by the manufacturer) from the local BestBuy.
 > 
 > Not long after, once I got the thing home, I realized that the
 > thing's understanding of current local time... important in
 > conjunction with the on-screen TV guide... was locked to Eastern
 > Standard Time, and there was no way to change it.  (This was/is
 > a bit of a problem for me, as I'm in PST/PDT.)
 > 
 > I called up Panasonic and explained the whole thing to a first-
 > level tech support minion.  She had no solution to offer me.
 > I insisted on speaking to a manager.
 > 
 > A manager got on the line and I prroceeded to re-explain the whole
 > issue to him.  I said that I needed a firmware fix.  He said that
 > there was no way the company was going to develop a fix "just for
 > you".  Politely, I persisted and said that the TV firmware was
 > self-evidently faulty.
 > 
 > 
 > <<click>>
 > <<dial tone>>

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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